Use smoking taxes the way we told you

What I am about to tell you will come as no surprise if you have lived in Massachusetts for any length of time.

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Posted Dec. 5, 2012 at 12:01 AM

Posted Dec. 5, 2012 at 12:01 AM

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What I am about to tell you will come as no surprise if you have lived in Massachusetts for any length of time.

Twenty years ago, the voters in this state became so determined to fight smoking that they whacked smokers with a 25-cent-a-pack "sin tax" surcharge. The money collected was supposed to go into stop-smoking programs of all kinds.

And for a while, much of it did. And the programs worked. Smoking dropped to 18 percent of the population statewide.

But the law had a loophole, one that survived a lawsuit at one point: The Legislature could redirect that money for anything it wanted in the event of a crisis.

And a crisis is just what we had a decade ago. Outgoing Gov. Jane Swift slashed $43 million from anti-smoking efforts as she went out the door, and the Legislature has kept it up ever since, according to Stephen Shestakofsky, who heads Tobacco Free Mass.

He told me: "About $100 million was collected in the early years and over $50 million went into anti-smoking, and it really worked."

When the fiscal crisis excuse was deployed to raid the kitty, he said, "The organizations working in the tobacco field led by the Heart Association and the American Cancer Society fought it in court and lost. The budget was absolutely slashed."

How slashed? It's down to $4 million a year, said Judith Coykendall, program manager for the Seven Hills Behavioral Health Tobacco-Free Community Partnership, which is stretched over 59 communities in this part of the state.

That puts Massachusetts right down at the bottom of the list of states, along with Arkansas. "That's pretty sad for Massachusetts, which was a leader," said Coykendall. The Centers for Disease Control calculates that we should be at the $30 million level, at the very least.

This despite the fact that cigarettes are taxed at $2.51 per pack today in Massachusetts, bringing in more than $800 million a year. But just 0.5 percent goes to stop-smoking programs.

This at a time when cities like New Bedford and Fall River could really use the effort. While the state smoking rate has been brought down from 26 percent to 18 percent, New Bedford's smoking rate (just the city, not the suburbs) is stuck at 28 percent.

And with it, Shestakofsky pointed out, comes the huge expense of treating smoking-related or smoking-exacerbated illnesses, which happens to be most of them.

When a dollar spent on smoking cessation recovers three dollars in lowered costs, it's crazy not to do it.

So what did we get that we don't get anymore? Coykendall spells it out: "We used to have local cessation programs. They've all been cut. There's a minimal outreach program now."

And there's more. No television ads such as those that were so effective in the 1990s. No more health instruction to educate schoolchildren about the dangers of tobacco, so kids are using more. There are far fewer people like Coykendall. "We used to have our annual meeting at the Worcester Centrum. Now we meet in a room," she said.

Look back on all the things that have changed in 20 years. Coykendall lists them: No more cigarette vending machines accessible by youngsters. Enforcement of rules about tobacco sales to minors. No more smoking in, and sometimes near, workplaces. None in bars and restaurants. More health insurance benefits for people who want to stop.

Next, housing authorities are phasing in bans on smoking by tenants and guests and offering them help in quitting if they would like. Mass Health pays for two courses of quit-smoking therapy a year. Wellness clinics promoting better health habits are popping up, including one on Purchase Street in New Bedford run by the Community Health Center.

So we're doing a lot with a little. But the effects are leveling off. Smoking statistics aren't dropping anymore. Massachusetts, especially cities like New Bedford, needs another push. The smokers are already paying for it, and it pays back three times over. What's the problem? Let's get busy, shall we?

Steve Urbon's column appears in The Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at 508-979-4448 or surbon@s-t.com.